Testing the attendance gap in a conservative church

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1999 by Penny Long Marler, C. Kirk Hadaway

Our attendance test involved the single Sunday morning worship service held at Broadview Evangelical Church. On the target Sunday (10 March 1996) we counted worship attendance by dividing the church floor and balcony into sections and assigning a member of the research team to count all persons seated or standing in their section. The number of persons attending worship at the church was 984 (a linear transformation of the actual number attending), or 40 percent of the church's membership.(4) Of those in attendance, 191 were children and youth (approximately one quarter of whom were likely too young to be baptized church members).(5)

A sample of church member households was drawn from the church's current membership directory and the research team interviewed a total of 300 adult members about their denominational affiliation, church membership, church attendance, and Sunday school attendance during the last seven days.(6) Interviews began on the Sunday afternoon following the worship service on the target Sunday (the research team asked about attendance "today," rather than the usual Gallup poll "last seven days" in interviews conducted on Sunday afternoon). Out of 300 members interviewed, 209 said they attended church during the previous week, or 70 percent of survey respondents. This total may seem high, but it should be remembered that this was a survey of church members - persons actually on the membership roll of this congregation rather than the usual survey of persons in the general population.(7)

If 70 percent of the membership of Broadview Evangelical actually attended worship, attendance should have totaled 1,710 persons, not counting approximately 48 non-baptized children and various adult non-members. If we assume that the number of Broadview members attending church elsewhere equals the number of adult visitors and regular non-member attendees attending Broadview, we would estimate that 1,758 persons (adults and children) should have been at the worship service on 10 March 1996.(8) Instead, attendance by our direct count was only 984.

Part of the discrepancy between the number of persons who claimed to have attended church and the number actually counted can be explained by the fact that some people do not mean that they attended church worship when they say they attended church. A follow-up question was asked of everyone who said they attended church: "was that a worship service or some other type of meeting?" Out of 209 persons who said they attended church, 182 said they attended a worship service. Another 26 persons said they attended some other type of meeting and one person refused to answer the question. Most of those who counted another type of meeting as attending church said they went to Sunday school rather than the worship service (16 persons).(9) Other responses for nonworship "church attendance" included choir practice (3), Wednesday night prayer meeting (2), Bible study, hand bell practice, a Lenten service, a "spiritual meeting," and a weight-loss workshop (one response each). One other person declined to say what they counted as another type of meeting.